Memory expert says Sandusky victims' testimony could have been shaped by police, therapists

BELLEFONTE -- Convicted sex offender Jerry Sandusky's quest for a new trial wrapped up Thursday with testimony defense attorneys argue jurors should hear about the credibility of repressed memories.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the University of California Irvine, testified she believes that wholesale walling off of traumatic memories - as several of Sandusky's child sex abuse victims claimed to have done - is like a junk science that must be treated with great skepticism.

"There's no credible scientific support for this notion of massive repression ... of horrific brutalization being walled off into the sub-conscious" only to be retrieved at a later date through counseling and therapy, Loftus said.

On the other hand, Loftus said, her research into memory has shown that false stories - with exposure to misinformation - can be implanted in otherwise healthy persons' minds "to the point where they remember things that never happened" complete with high levels of detail and emotion.

Sandusky, the longtime top defensive assistant to legendary Penn State coach Joe Paterno, was convicted of the serial sexual abuse of 10 boys between 1994 and 2008.

He is serving a 30-year minimum sentence at a state prison in Somerset County.

Once one of the superstars of the Penn State firmament, Sandusky seemed especially upbeat during courtroom breaks Thursday, enjoying chats with a boyhood friend from his hometown of Washington, Pa., and talking sports with sheriff's deputies staffing a courtroom that has steadily drawn fewer and fewer spectators.

The defense argued trial attorney Joe Amendola erred by not calling a witness like Loftus to buttress his attacks on the evolution of the statements about Sandusky that many of the eight male victims who testified in the trial gave to police during the course of the three-year investigation.

Loftus's testimony stopped well short of turning the case on its head by itself.

Under cross-examination by Senior Deputy Attorney General Jennifer Peterson, the professor conceded she cannot say the victims whose statements and testimony she reviewed were never abused by Sandusky.

Peterson hit Loftus for drawing conclusions from defense-selected excerpts of police statements and testimony transcripts, with no context from body language, demeanor or tone of voice - all of which the jury viewed live in reaching its guilty verdicts.

The prosecution has also pushed back against the notion that any of the Sandusky victims actually got so-called "repressed memory" therapy, which involves specific techniques like hypnosis and age regression.

But defense attorney Alexander Lindsay contends Loftus's points are a chance to raise reasonable doubt with jurors that Sandusky never received.

A linch-pin of the appeals argument is that a combination of sessions with therapists, suggestive questioning by eager police and the promise of a payday from follow-up civil claims all worked to create a wall of damning testimony against Sandusky that the defense never properly attacked.

The problem for the appellate team is that Amendola did make many of these same claims at trial.

To win a retrial, Lindsay must convince Judge John Foradora that - either because of a lack of information, time or talent - Amendola missed chances to puncture the prosecution's case so badly that in a new trial the outcome could be different.

Victim 7 attributed the evolution of his statements to police from never being abused by Sandusky to having been subjected to repeated instances of fondling, to having "had everything negative (about his relationship with the then-Penn State football celebrity) blocked out...

"I wasn't willing to go there, essentially, to think back to those times," Victim 7 said.

That changed, he testified, partially through counseling and therapy.

But he told Peterson that while he had talked about repressed memory therapy with one of his counselors, he never was treated with any of those methods prior to Sandusky's trial.

Loftus spent a large part of her testimony on the notion of planted memories.

While she said she can't say with certainty it's what happened here, Loftus said the case record makes clear several victims' stories changed "dramatically" during the course of the investigation.